I wanted
to be a professional footballer. I didn’t think I was going to
make it, because I didn’t seem to be that good, but I really
loved it. I know people don’t equate football with transvestism
but the fact is, there’s got to be a lot of football players
and football fans and people in the army, navy, airforce or driving
forklift trucks who are TVs, because it’s male tomboy.
It’s kind of like, male lesbians because we all fancy women
as well. But if you embrace it, you get certain gifts from the
feminine side.
I tried to get into plays at school but I couldn’t because they were convinced
I was crap. Maybe I was. I would audition but never get a role.
I learned the clarinet for the wrong reasons. I was trying to play the piano
but ended up playing this clarinet and I had to be in the school band. They put
on a musical, Oliver! Or something, and I had to play the bloody clarinet. One
kid at school’s dad was a semi-pro actor and my big treat was I would hand
him his hat and his cane. It was my big ‘My God, I’m almost in the
play’ thing.
So from the age of seven I really wanted to act and I did really weird things
to try to get into it. I did Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The
choir at the school was doing it, and I wasn’t in the choir, so I hung
around them and lifted things and pushed things. And eventually I was in it,
and I even managed to get a solo line out of it.
We did a version of Beauty and the Beast when I was seven and I was a street
urchin. The street urchins combined had one line – ‘Oh Beauty, don’t
go’ – which, when the line came up, I used to say really quickly
before everyone: ‘OhBeautyDon’tGo.’ All the other kids would
go, ‘Oh…he’s said it.’ So I would make it my own line.
Upstaging…Because the chorus at seven was bunch of dopey kids. ‘There’s
a star…’ ‘Wha…?’ ‘There’s a star…’ ‘Wha…?’ ‘you’re
a shepherd.’ ‘Am I? Oh yeah…’
There was a flu epidemic when I was seven so I was not only in Beauty and the
Beast, I was a shepherd as well. So I was in two plays. I was a featured shepherd.
After that the parts were very lean. I couldn’t get into any of the big
musicals - Pirates of Penzance, or any of that stuff.
They did Julius Caesar and I played Trebonius. Of all he conspirators against
Caesar, Trebonius is the most boring. One, because his name sounds like trombone
and two, because there’s a line where they go:
OMNES
See, Trebonius knows his mark, for look how he leads Mark Antony
away so that Mark Antony will not be there when it all gets
really tough with Caesar and we stick all the plastic daggers
in with the syringe of blood attached. So that means Trebonius
won’t have a plastic dagger and a syringe of blood because
he’ll be standing in the fucking wings when it happens.
I wasn’t on stage. I’m just in the wings with Mark
Antony going, ‘Ah, they’re doing it with the old
plastic daggers.’ There’s ten conspirators and nine
of them are on stage stabbing Julius Caesar and there’s
one in the wings, going:
TREBONIUS
I’m not fucking there.
They used to take photographs in dress rehearsals and there’s
all these conspirators with their plastic daggers, except for
one kid who’s got the syringe full of blood facing the
camera. One kid called Caldwell, who was…shot.
I did get into one thing, though. I always liked comedy, and when I was twelve
I got my first laughs. We did this revue in a class taken by a teacher called
Sam Grey. He was kind of different. Apparently he got married and he had this
motorbike trip around South America planned so he went and did that instead
of a honeymoon. Watergate was happening at the time and he used to read the
tapes out to us. He told us how to say ‘breast’ in French.
And Sam Grey did this revue, and we were doing all these sketches we’d
written and I got distinct laughs on a solo bit. It was a mime thing. This
guy was bowling to me and I was supposed to be a cricketer and I was batting
the ball away with supreme confidence and arrogance, looking for the ball in
the distance then realising I’d smashed the wicket. I remember thinking,
hey, I’ve got laughs here!
And then I discovered Peter Sellers. My dad had his records and I remember
trying to do the accents. Trying to do an Indian accent before I thought, this
actually gets me into a difficult area, because if you do different ethnic
accents from around the world it can look like you’re taking the piss.
I do a routine about the Welsh guys carving Stonehenge and I try to make sure
I’m not taking the piss. There’s these rather effete druids and
the Welsh guys are going, “You fucken basstards!”
So I was at St Bede’s and…yeah. I was very fit then. I did a lot
of running about. The sea is at the bottom of the school and the Downs are
at the side. We used to get up at seven o’clock in the morning and walk
through the sea to the reef. It would cut our feet to shreds.
You’d hear large booms in the middle of the night, where an old World
War Two mine had hit the cliffs. The School chef was a coastguard and he used
to have to go out and make sure there were no others. When I was there, a searchlight
would pass across the bedroom window every night from Sovereign Lighthouse.
I used to go to sleep with wshhh – this flash of light going past the
window. Which you got used to.
We had the coal strike as well, which was great. Lessons would end and there
was no food, so we had to eat crisps. We were making tents and putting candles
under the bedclothes.
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